Modern Perl

Trouble installing with CPAN?

I've seen quite a few blogs recently regarding Perl programming and dependency issues.  Since I a a big fan of Moose and Catalyst, you probably know I fall on the side of 'embrace dependencies'.  Given so, I suggest a new side project.  I will do my best to solve the first 10 "it didn't install problems" for myself.  Hopefully others will follow suit and discuss what they did on their blogs.  So far I've solved two (one with a pending patch) and working on the third.  Here's what I did/am doing

1) Template Toolkit.  There was a change in POD parsing rules that was causing a pod check test to fail when using newer Perl versions.  Patched the POD and changed the 'author quality' tests so that they are not run by default (as they shouldn't be).  Patch was accepted and part of Template::Toolkit 2.22

2) URI.  http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=36554  which is a bug that causes a test to fail if your internet service provider is playing games with failed host lookups.  Created git clone and requested merge at http://gitorious.org/~jnapiorkowski/perl-uri/uri-heuristicstest-fix and am currently trying to get in contact with the maintainer to see if I can get the patch accepted.  If anyone can help, much appreciated

3 and 4) CPAN on Macs.  This is a more subtle issue, related to how CPAN prefers, but doesn't require, File::HomeDir as a module to help it locate the correct place to put your '.cpan' directory.  File::HomeDir for the Mac currently depends on Mac::Carbon, which fails installation more then it passes.  I've offered to port the tiny bits of Mac::Carbon that File::HomeDir needs (I don't have the tuits or Mac programming background to take on Mac::Carbon) however this introduces another problem in that if you are on a Mac and CPAN does find File::HomeDir, it puts .cpan into $home/Library/Application Support/.cpan rather than $home/.cpan as we might expect.  The space in "Application Support" causes huge trouble, since many test cases don't properly escape their paths, and pointlessly fail.  So as item 3) I plan to fix File::HomeDir and for 4 I plan to try and convince the CPAN maintainers that .cpan should go into $home or at least check for those spaces in the path and issue some sort of warning or advice.  I also recommend cpan authors start taking more care with how one constructs paths, since not everyone is on a unix platform.  Your thoughts and advice very welcomed!

Updates, Git and Other Stuff

Thanks to everyone who gave me excellent feedback regarding the git blog.  Right now I am following nothingmuch's excellent instructions which were referred to in comments, but you can quick link here.

Also, catching up on some back blogs, I just notice Matt Trout's announcement that he's donating all the money he gets from the new Catalyst Book.  That's really awesome if him and I hope people give him the credit he deserves for such a move.  Cheer to you Matt!

Migrating to git from Subversion

Now that more and more of the perl programming open source projects are either on git or planning to move, I'd like to start planning a git migration for my $work repositories.  It's a good time for me to do it since I basically have a new team with no source control experience, meaning there's little in the way of existing workflows to mess up.  Plus, from my end it's one less tool I need to remember how to use :)  If I can get off of subversion for work, that means I ony have to remember how to use svk, git and cvs.

So, looking for recommendations for self hosting git.  We've been using websvn for browser viewing of the repo, and I'd like something at least as good as that. 

Please don't suggest migrating to one of the external providers, such as github.  My local $work IT policy won't allow it.

thanks!